Radical Empathy

Romm (The Mercy Papers) delivers a piercing collection of stories about the limits of happiness. In “Marital Problems,” a long-married woman, bored by the routine comfort of her husband, entertains sexual fantasies about her contractor during a kitchen renovation. “Do the Dead Grieve” traces a new mother’s phantasmagoric logic brought on by sleep deprivation, which causes her to worry that her dead mother will run off with another man in the afterlife rather than wait for her father to join her. In the haunting title story, an Ivy League student sells her eggs to a movie star to finance her life in New York City, then grapples with a sense of loss as she watches the movie star’s child grow up in the public eye. Loss also permeates “The Flower,” in which a daffodil speaks to a woman living alone during the Covid-19 lockdown. Romm’s prose is supple and direct, as when the narrator of “Marital Problems” wistfully describes another mother’s comparatively ample bosom: “Men, babies, whole towns could probably live off that body for a while, so glossy with nutrients.” These off-kilter tales delight. (Sept.)